Ben Stiller has long since stopped analysing what draws him to projects. Why bother? For most of his nearly four-decade career as an actor and film-maker, he has topped the box office or slyly captured the zeitgeist, devising – with a stuck zipper, a lip pout or Robert De Niro as a father-in-law – some of pop culture’s stickiest cinematic moments.
So when he first started filming in his parents’ apartment a few weeks after the death of his father, Jerry Stiller, in 2020, he wasn’t sure why, exactly. “It was just this instinct,” he says. Partly, it was about preservation; the five-bedroom on the Upper West Side of New York City was his childhood home, and it was due to be sold. Until the last possible moment, he shot video tours of the memento-filled, and then emptied corners where he and his older sister, Amy Stiller, grew up, doing bits and homework, bickering and celebrating, with Jerry and their mother, Anne Meara, who died in 2015.
Then, too, he wanted to memorialise Jerry and Anne – or Stiller and Meara, as they were better known in their performance heyday. A comedic duo whose banter catapulted them from the club circuit to household fame in the Ed Sullivan era, they were also a bridge from a midcentury Borscht Belt comedy style to one developed for the TV screen. For an audience of 30 million viewers, they played up their real-life identities as a husband and wife mismatched in culture and religion – in the years when interfaith unions were still rare. At home, they worked relentlessly on their routines, honing the razor timing that their son, who will turn 60 in November, absorbed and seeded through his own work.
Ben Stiller quickly realised he should make a documentary about them. The film, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, which opened in US theatres on Friday and streams from October 24th on Apple TV, dips into their comic lineage, a legacy that Ben Stiller has transformed as the star of billion-dollar blockbuster series like Night at the Museum and Meet the Parents (he’s filming its fourth instalment) and as director and co-writer of satires like Tropic Thunder and Zoolander.
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It’s also part family history, or therapy, as Stiller and his kin drill into what it was like growing up backstage or on sets, with sometimes absentee parents. But the subtext (and often enough, text) of the documentary is more elemental: It’s about what it means to lead an artistic life – a profoundly ambitious, often workaholic one – and be part of a family. It’s a tension that Stiller has only recently fully confronted. And he did it while filming, with his children.
The moment when his teenage son starkly tells him, on screen, that he didn’t feel fatherhood was Stiller’s top priority is a rug-pull of epic proportions.
“As a film-maker, I was like, ‘Okay, this is a good moment for the movie,’” Stiller said after the documentary’s premiere at the New York Film Festival. “As a person, I was like, ‘That sucks.’”
The project is almost painfully personal – “territory that I haven’t really travelled in before,” Stiller says in an interview in Manhattan. The documentary took five years to complete, as he at first avoided delving into some of the more vulnerable details and later wondered what his parents might have made of it when he did. He wasn’t sure what the reception for the film would be. But “it doesn’t really matter,” he says. “It’s something I needed to make.”
As Stiller has traversed comedy and darker stuff, his movies and shows have stealthily shaped culture for a generation, from Reality Bites, his Gen X-delineating 1994 directorial debut, to Severance, the Emmy-winning Apple TV series that he currently produces and often directs. (He is overseeing the show’s third season, though he will be too busy with other projects to direct.)
His friend Chris Rock, a costar in the animated Madagascar series, who has known Stiller since the 1990s, calls him “my hero” – “he’s one of the greatest comic actors to ever live” – and as a film-maker, an inspiration: “I’m trying to get wherever he’s at. It’s so far ahead, I can’t even see it.”
As career chapters, Reality Bites and “everance are stylistically worlds apart. He says Severance appealed to him because it is a sci-fi thriller – about a corporation whose employees sign on to split themselves into “innies” (at the office) and “outies” (at home) – contained in a workplace sitcom.
How should we value a job? And how do the people who surround us fit into that? That’s a theme Stiller has returned to again and again. Even the Meet the Parents juggernaut rests partly on whether De Niro’s stoic, Silent Generation type views nursing as a suitable profession for a man, Stiller’s character. His most successful satires, like Zoolander, about the fashion world, send up industries with wildly skewed systems of worth.
And in Reality Bites, when Winona Ryder’s character weighs how to build her nascent film-making career and whom to choose as her boyfriend, she raises the same question Stiller is asking as he tells the story of his parents, who by most respects succeeded: How do you build a productive life as an artist, and a partner?
Stiller’s parents were married for 61 years. Their union survived the tribulations of show business, their different creative drives, and her drinking and the way it destabilised the family. Stiller worried about including that in the documentary, but, he says, “she talked about it a lot, and she evolved”.
“They were pretty great parents,” he says.
The devotion in their relationship, its endurance, was a lesson he absorbed late. “The career stuff falls away,” he says. “You get older, and you’re left with the real stuff in your life. And for them, they were there for each other. And that’s what I want, at the end of the day.”
That personal reckoning came for Stiller in the last decade, a few years after he was successfully treated for aggressive prostate cancer. In 2017, he announced a separation from his wife, actor Christine Taylor. But during the pandemic, they reconciled after they began living together again in New York so he could see their son, Quinlin Stiller, now 20 and a college student, and their daughter, Ella Stiller, who is 23 and a Juilliard-trained actor. (Rock: “A marriage getting back together is harder to do than a $600 million movie.”)
And Stiller realised – with his children’s prodding – that as much as he’d vowed to be around more than his parents, he was often not fully present. Putting it in the film is a level of candour almost unheard-of for Hollywood powerhouses, but, he says, “I admit it because it’s true.”
He chokes up. “To actually have, now, a real relationship with them, I feel very fortunate,” he says, “because it took me a while to really understand the work that you have to put in to make that happen.”
When he’s on screen, Stiller – often as a put-upon Everyman – guides his audience through big life questions with a relatable fallibility. “He makes making a mistake look good,” says Adam Scott, a star of Severance and a costar in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013), Stiller’s underappreciated passion project. “Like, I hope my mistakes land as well as his.”
Partly that’s because they’re often built for laughs. When they began making Severance, Scott says, he and Stiller were both reeling from a parent’s death. The show is partly about grief and loss, he says. But without Stiller’s sense of humour, “it would be a tough watch,” Scott adds. “And the things that he finds funny about it – about the world, about the characters – is really different from anyone else.”
I don’t think either of us could have imagined having a regular life
“The most Ben Stiller” scene of the series, he says, is in the season two finale, when the loyalist manager Milchick is having a canned conversation with an animatronic version of the company’s founder, Keir. “But the timing is really off,” Scott says, “and the head makes a particular noise when it turns.” Stiller was directing – and controlling Keir’s movements.
“I think that he really thinks the Abraham Lincoln robot at Disneyland is very funny,” Scott says. “I have never seen him happier. He was positively giddy on set that day.”
That Stiller transformed comedy is a given. His influential sketch programme, The Ben Stiller Show, which earned an Emmy for best writing in 1993 – after it was cancelled one season in – elevated Bob Odenkirk, a writer at the time, to an on-camera presence and gave Judd Apatow his first real job. The programme’s stylistically faithful parodies became a comic blueprint, and Apatow later credited Stiller for his own improv-heavy directing style. Even The Cable Guy, Stiller’s critically reviled directorial follow-up to Reality Bites, has been reassessed: it helped introduce cringe comedy.
Although his wife ribs him for it, Stiller is fond of saying he doesn’t think of himself as a comedian. “If someone says, like, ‘Your dad or you, who’s funny?’ My dad’s funnier,” he says, bringing up the comparison himself as we sit in an empty cafe in Chelsea Piers. He is dressed in all black, his face serious, angular. Making him smile or laugh feels like a little victory.
Jerry Stiller, his son says, was “genuinely funny” – though throughout his life, he laboured over every line. Even when the elder Stiller became a viewer favourite, in his late 60s, as George Costanza’s pugnacious father on Seinfeld, his scripts “had meticulous annotations in the margins”, says Journey Gunderson, executive director of the US National Comedy Center, where Ben Stiller donated his parents’ papers. “He was never just coming in, delivering what was written.”
By contrast, Meara, who started in theatre, had an easier flow to a punchline, her son says in the documentary. But she gravitated toward drama and became a playwright later in life. (She also appeared as Steve’s mother in Sex and the City.) Like her, Stiller says, humour has “never been what’s really driving me”.
But yes, of course, he knows how to make things funny. It was foundational to his youth – voices, bits. (In one recurring improv, Ben was a mean acting teacher, and his father was the oldest student in class.) When their parents were away working, and Stiller and his sister were in the care of their long-time nanny, Hazel Hugh, they planned elaborate livingroom productions: a number from Shenandoah or Jesus Christ Superstar, a little Shakespeare, a nightclub act. Their parent’s return was opening night; the ovations were epic. “I don’t think either of us could have imagined having a regular life,” says Stiller’s sister, Amy, an actor.
By the time Ben Stiller was 13, he had a camera – a gift from his father – and a subscription to American Cinematographer magazine. “He did, like, these blood-and-gut films with the kids from the neighbourhood, with murder in the park,” Amy says.
Yet their parents’ absences weighed heavily, too. “I remember him talking about, ‘Sometimes the only time I would see my parents is when they were on The Ed Sullivan Show,’” says Ben Stiller’s friend Jerry Stahl, a novelist and screenwriter.
Stiller and Meara appeared on the variety show 36 times, always with new material. As a child, Ben Stiller says, he had only an inkling of what it meant for his parents to forge that kind of career. But in making the documentary, which uses archival footage of their performances, and hundreds of hours of audio and videotapes his father made of their work and family life, it struck him, he says: “Oh, my God, look what they were doing; look how hard that was.” Coming up with fresh sketches, as a couple, every five or six weeks, for a huge live television audience, was not, he adds, something he could do. Add in the pressure, he says, of “having to raise two kids and having to make it work; their livelihood was dependent on that, because by doing well on that show, that would open up all the other doors for them”.
They not only succeeded; they also upended some models. Most comedy duos are based on a hierarchy, with a clown and a straight man, says Gunderson of the National Comedy Center. But the Stiller and Meara team “was built on an equal push and pull. Both artists were capable of driving laughs and the momentum of the sketch”.
Their act redefined gender dynamics and cultural ones – by portraying their own interfaith marriage (Stiller was Jewish, and Meara was raised Catholic, though she later converted to Judaism), and by not making Jewishness the punchline, Gunderson says. “They put their lived reality on national television. They made it not only normal, but hilarious and warm. You can feel empathy in the routines.”
Christopher Walken, a star of Severance, met Stiller and Meara as a young performer in New York. “When I saw the family together, you could tell they all really liked each other, enjoyed each other’s company,” he says. “Jerry and Anne would have this marvellous New Year’s Eve party, and you’d go and see all these actors. There’d be a huge pile of coats on the bed. They knew everybody.”
He befriended Jerry Stiller – “a beautiful guy, kind, generous” – and was “a little scared” of Anne: “I always had the feeling she knew what I was up to at all times. I was a little wild.”
Walken also starred with Ben Stiller in his Broadway debut, the John Guare comedy The House of Blue Leaves, in 1986 and was impressed by him even then. “It’s not just his ambition; it’s his talent,” Walken says. “You look at a young person, and you can see that they’ve got everything it takes.”
As a director, Stiller had a reputation for being – to put it charitably – intense, a perfectionist known for marathon script revision sessions and round-the-clock calls to fine-tune the most minute details. “He really makes it hard for himself,” says Stahl, whom Stiller portrayed, as a drug-addicted writer, in Permanent Midnight (1998). “So he’ll do one project that seems miraculous and impossible, and then he’ll find something harder.”
It’s a work ethic that was passed down. “My mother’s bar for what was good or what was hacky was something I really took in,” Stiller says. And in the documentary, there’s footage of a preperformance Jerry Stiller, zeroing in. It was, says Scott, “a mirror to Ben on set, when he is focusing in and trying to work something out”.
Ben Stiller is still exacting as a film-maker, doing take after take. But he is more cognisant of how his demands land. A few years ago, “I was not as aware of the impact that I would have on people,” he says. “I learned through experiences – and from people letting me know.” The perspective of age helped, too, “and being humbled a little bit in life”. (A dividing line was when Zoolander 2, released in 2016, flopped.)
For almost all of his career, Stiller says, “I found safety in the work”. He is still happiest, he says, when he is in the groove with his many projects. But he has chilled out, in the words of several friends and colleagues. “He’s come around now,” Stahl says. “Family is a priority.”
Surveying his parents’ life reshuffled how he thinks about his own – in ways that surprised him and will probably end up on screen. “It’s actually, creatively, what I want to be doing,” Stiller says. “It’s made me want to delve more into those memories because I feel like that is stuff that is really worth exploring, to figure out, in myself.” – This article originally appeared in the New York Times
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